"Karen Traviss - Wess'Har 05 - Ally" - читать интересную книгу автора (Traviss Karen)

Prologue
The Temporary City, Bezer'ej, Cavanagh's Star system: interrogation room

One down, one to go.
Shan Frankland had two ways of tracking Lindsay bloody Neville: to let the Eqbas find her by scanning
the sea or by squeezing information out of Mohan Rayat and doing the job herself, like she always had.

Lindsay had to be found before she did something stupid.

I should have shot her when I had the chance and when she could still be killed. The second
chance, fuck it. And Rayat, too. Christ, I'm getting slack.

Rayat watched Shan walk around the room without moving his head. She knew when someone was
following her in their peripheral vision by the fixed stare ahead and the blink rate; but Rayat didn't blink.

He was a spook. He was trained for this. Sod it, she'd make him blink. She was a copper, so she was
trained for it too.

"So where do you think she's gone?" Shan asked.

Rayat didn't move a muscle. "No idea. It's a big ocean, and Lindsay's an unpredictable woman."

"You wouldn't be shitting me, of course."

"Would I have turned myself in if I was colluding with her?"

Shan thought of a few scenarios where he might have done just that. She wouldn't trust him as far as she
could spit in a Force Ten. "You tell me."

"I've seen what this parasite can do and it scares me."

"So have I. "C'naatat had kept her alive through a shot-shattered skull and drowning and even drifting in
the vacuum of space minus a suit. Scared? You have no idea, chum. She paused in front of him and
folded her arms: he sat at the bare table with his hands folded. "You used to call it a symbiont. You're a
scientist. You're precise about terminology."

"Symbionts are about mutual benefit. Parasites are about keeping you as alive as you need to be for their
benefit."

"It wants to reproduce and find new hosts, that's for sure."

"So you can't kill me easily. You know that."

"I know. Consider it an incentive for me."

Shan stared him in the eye until he looked away. She had no intention of giving in again to her urge to
punch that smirk off his face. Whatever you threw at a c'naatat host, it made them stronger: the organism
adapted instantly with a nifty work-round, cheating death with disturbing ease, and the host came out
with a new healing adaptation. No, she wasn't going to oblige Rayat by making a supersoldier out of him.
It was bad enough that he'd been infected with a strain of c'naatat that now knew how to keep her alive